When is genocide not really genocide? When the victims are small, impoverished brown people no wants or cares about – Burma’s Rohingya.

Their plight has finally commanded some media attention because of the suffering of Rohingya boat people, 7,000 of whom continue to drift in the waters of the Andaman Sea without food, water or shelter from the intense sun. At least 2,500 lucky refugees are in camps in Indonesia.

Mass graves of Rohingya are being discovered in Thailand and Burma (Myanmar). Large numbers of Rohingya are fleeing for their lives from their homeland, Burma, while the world does nothing. Burma is believed to have some 800,000 Rohingya citizens.

This week, the Dalai Lama and other Nobel Peace Prize winners call on Burma and its much ballyhooed ‘democratic leader,’ Aung San Suu Kyi, to halt persecution of the Rohingya. They did nothing.

The Rohyinga’s persecution has been going on for over half a century, totally unobserved by the rest of the world. Burma’s government claims they are descendants of economic immigrants from neighboring Bengal who came as indentured laborers to the British colony of Burma in early the 19th century.

Interestingly, the British Empire created a similar ethnic problem by bringing large numbers of Tamils from southern India to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to work the British tea plantations.

But Bengalis have been on Burma’s Arakan Coast for centuries. What sets Rohyingas apart is their dark skin and Islamic faith. Burma seems determined to expel its Muslims for good, treating them like human garbage. It’s the kind of brutal ethnic cleansing, racism and genocide that we recently saw unleashed against Albanian and Bosnian Muslims and Catholics in Bosnia and Kosovo.

I’ve been watched the steady rise of a weird form of Asian racism among some militant Buddhists in Burma and Sri Lanka. The first sign was anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka a decade ago led by fiery Buddhist monks.

But wait a minute. I have always been very attracted to Buddhism as a gentle, sensible, human faith. My first book, “War at the Top of the World,” was inspired by my conversations with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. I like to meditate in Buddhist temples whenever I’m in Asia.

So from where did all those screaming, hate-promoting Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka and Burma come from? Clearly, from deep smoldering fires that we knew nothing about. The bloody Sri Lankan civil war between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils was largely initiated by militant monks. One also remembers Vietnam’s self-immolating monks.

The same phenomena erupted in Burma, a nation rent by violent regional and ethnic tensions that have raged since 1945. But who initiated a campaign of hate and pogroms against the Arakan Muslims who were quietly, minding their own business and eking out a living? As soon as Burma’s military stepped back from total rule, the anti-Muslim violence went critical.

The triple-sainted (at least in the Western media) Aung San Suu Kyi refuses to hear foreign pleas that she do something. Burma will hold elections in November and she wants to avoid antagonizing Buddhist voters – even when her nation in practicing genocide.

I stood in front of her in Rangoon years ago when she was still a prisoner of the military junta, listening to her platitudes about human rights and democracy. I thought then and now that like all politicians, her words were not to be given too much credit. Maybe those fools on the Nobel Peace Prize committee could revoke her Peace Prize and, while they’re at it, Obama’s.

Thailand wants no Rohyingas; Indonesia says only a few thousand on a temporary basis. Australia, which is not overly fond of non-whites, say no. Bangladesh can’t even feed its own wretched people. So the poor Rohyingas are a persecuted people without a country, adrift on a sea of sorrows.

What of the Muslim world? What of that self-proclaimed “Defender of the Faith. Saudi Arabia?” The Saudis are just buying $109 billion worth of US arms which they can’t use, but they don’t have even a few pennies for their desperate co-religionists in the Andaman Sea. The Holy Koran enjoins Muslims to aid their brethren wherever they are persecuted – this is the true essence of jihadism.

But the Saudis are too busy plotting against Iran, bombing Yemen, and supporting rebels in Iraq and Syria, or getting ready for their summer vacations in Spain and France, to think about fellow Muslims dying of thirst. Pakistan, which could help, has not, other than offering moral support. Neither has India, one of the world’s leading Muslim nations.

In the end, it may be up to the United States to rescue the Rohyinga, just as it rescued Bosnia and Kosovo. That’s fine with me. I don’t want the US to be the world’s policeman; I want it to be the world’s rescuer, its SOS force, its liberator.

We should tell Burma to halt its genocide today, or face isolation and sanctions from the outside world.

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia.

U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Myanmar to address the status of Rohingya Muslims in the country.

“The communal situation in Rakhine and elsewhere remains fragile,” Ban said. “There are already troubling signs of ethnic and religious differences being exploited in the run-up to the elections. The reform process could be jeopardized if the underlying causes of these tensions are left unaddressed.”

Myanmar was criticized for failing to include in its census – the first in three decades – Rohingya Muslims in the list of the country’s 135 official ethnic groups, which was taken as a sign that the country still has no intention of recognizing its 1.3 million Rohingya as citizens.

Myanmar President Thein Sein launched the census and said it had been done in line with international standards.

“From the political dialogues that we will be conducting in the very near future to establish a union based on federal principles, we will certainly encounter issues of categorizing and recognizing the ethnic national races based on political agreements reached,” he said.

The Dalai Lama joined in the debate and asked Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do more to help the persecuted minority in her country. It is not the first time the Tibetan spiritual leader has pleaded to Suu Kyi, who has always refused to publicly speak out for the Rohingya.

Myanmar refuses to recognize the term Rohingya and calls the people Bengali, suggesting they come from neighboring Bangladesh. Officials in Myanmar said they would not attend the Bangkok meeting if the term Rohingya was used on the statement; which Thailand accepted by titling the conference “Special Meeting on Irregular Migration in the Indian Ocean.”

Many nongovernmental organizations have been trying to help the Rohingyas, which the U.N. describes as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities. On Thursday, the Rakhine state legislature voted to shut down unregistered NGOs, arguing they had been “causing bigger problems” between Muslims and Buddhists. Doctors Without Borders was one of the nongovernmental organizations asked to stop working in the Rakhine state, where it was providing health care to displaced people in camps.

Yangon: Hundreds of demonstrators, including Buddhist monks, have marched in Yangon against what they say is “bullying” by the international community about Myanmar’s stance on the Rohingya ethnic minority group.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar in recent months claiming fear of persecution, and many are still languishing at sea as they wait to seek asylum in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

A spokeswoman for Wednesday’s protest, held by nationalist and religious groups, insisted the humanitarian crisis was not caused by Myanmar.

“These people are not from Myanmar,” Sandy Thin Mar Oo said, yelling through a loudspeaker to the protesters who gathered before marching the streets.

In an impassioned speech, she called for the United Nations and the international community to stop blaming Myanmar as the sole perpetrators of the unfolding human tragedy.

Human rights groups and the UN have warned of a spiralling humanitarian crisis and have urged Myanmar to provide better conditions for the Rohingya, who are considered by the Myanmar government as illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

About 400 people, including 40 monks, gathered to show their support for the anti-Rohingya campaign on Wednesday.

Protesters donned T-shirts emblazoned with the captions, “Boat people are not from Myanmar” and “Myanmar should not take the blame for boat people problem”.

U Win Hlan Tha, a monk who attended the rally, said he wanted to show his support of “real” Myanmar people.

“These people are not really us and the international media has got it all wrong,” he said. “What they have to understand is that we are never going to let them in because they have never been one of us.”

Protesters donned T-shirts emblazoned with the captions, ‘Boat people are not from Myanmar’ [AP]

Bystanders watched quietly as protesters led a short march through a section of a Yangon suburb where many Muslim residents reside.

Asked what they thought of the campaign, most declined to comment. But others said they fully supported the protesters and their message to the international community.

“We had never even heard of the word ‘Rohingya’ before the riots in Sittwe in 2012,” said one bystander who declined to be named.

“For once, I don’t think the government is lying to Myanmar people,” he said.

Asia director of Human Rights Watch, Brad Adams, said neighbouring ASEAN countries needed to do more for the Rohingya, who had fallen prey to human traffickers because of their desperate situation in Myanmar.

“Just as important, there will be no long-term solution unless [Myanmar] ends its rights-abusing and discriminatory policies toward the Rohinga and joins other countries in taking action against smugglers and traffickers who abuse and prey on them,” he added.

“In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize … to Aung San Suu Kyi,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in 1991, it wished “to honour this woman for her unflagging efforts and to show its support for the many people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means”.

Suu Kyi, the Committee added, was “an important symbol in the struggle against oppression”.

Fast forward 24 years, and the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar might disagree with the dewy-eyed assessment of the five-member Nobel Committee. And with Gordon Brown, too, who called Suu Kyi “the world’s most renowned and courageous prisoner of conscience”. Not to mention Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has said that the people of Myanmar “desperately need the kind of moral and principled leadership that Aung San Suu Kyi would provide”.

In recent years, the Rohingya Muslims – “the world’s most persecuted minority”, according to the United Nations – have struggled to attract attention to their plight.

Until, that is, a few weeks ago, when thousands of Rohingya refugees began arriving in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, while thousands more believed to be still stranded on rickety boats off the coasts of these three countries, with dwindling supplies of food and clean water.

‘So hungry, so skinny’

“Fisherman Muchtar Ali broke down in tears when he set eyes on the overcrowded boat carrying desperate, starving Rohingya off the coast of Indonesia,” noted a report by AFP on May 20.

“I was speechless,” Ali told AFP. “Looking at these people, me and my friends cried because they looked so hungry, so skinny.”

These Rohingya “boat people”, however, are a symptom of a much bigger problem. As Kate Schuetze, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Researcher, has observed: “The thousands of lives at risk should be the immediate priority, but the root causes of this crisis must also be addressed. The fact that thousands of Rohingya prefer a dangerous boat journey they may not survive to staying in Myanmar speaks volumes about the conditions they face there.”

Those oppressive conditions range from a denial of citizenship to Myanmar’s 1.3 million Rohingya Muslims to severe restrictions on their movement, employment and access to education and healthcare, as well as a discriminatory law imposing a “two child” limit on Rohingya families in their home state of Rakhine.

Hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes; their towns and villages razed to the ground by rampaging mobs. In 2014, the government even banned the use of the word “Rohingya”, insisting the Muslim minority, who have lived in that country for generations, be registered in the census as “Bengali”.

Inexcusable silence

So, where does Suu Kyi fit into all this? Well, for a start, her silence is inexcusable. Her refusal to condemn, or even fully acknowledge, the state-sponsored repression of her fellow countrymen and women, not to mention the violence meted out to them by Buddhist extremists inspired by the monk Ashin Wirathu (aka “The Burmese Bin Laden”), makes her part of the problem, not the solution.

“In a genocide, silence is complicity, and so it is with Aung San Suu Kyi,” observed Penny Green, a law professor at the University of London and director of the State Crime Initiative, in a recent op-ed for The Independent. Imbued with “enormous moral and political capital”, Green argued, Myanmar’s opposition leader could have challenged “the vile racism and Islamophobia which characterises Burmese political and social discourse”.

She didn’t. Instead, she spent the past few years courting the Buddhist majority of Myanmar, whose votes she needs in order to be elected president in 2016 – if, that is, the military will allow her to be elected president, or even permit her to stand – by playing down the violence perpetrated against the Muslim minority, and trying to suggest a false equivalence between persecutors and victims of persecution.

In a BBC interview in 2013, for example, Suu Kyi shamefully blamed the violence on “both sides”, telling interviewer Mishal Husain that “Muslims have been targeted but Buddhists have also been subjected to violence”.

The investigators, who visited Rohingya internment camps and interviewed the survivors of violent attacks, concluded: “Genocide will remain a serious risk for the Rohingya if the government of Burma does not immediately address the laws and policies that oppress the entire community.”

Yet, despite the boats and the bodies, the reports and the revelations, Suu Kyi is still mute. She hasn’t raised a finger to help the Rohingya, as they literally run for their lives. Shouldn’t we expect more from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?

Maybe not. The words “Henry” and “Kissinger” come to mind. Plus, the Nobel Prize Committee has a pretty awkward history of prematurely handing out peace prizes. Remember Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat’s joint prize in 1994? Ask the children of Gaza how that worked out. Remember Barack Obama’s in 2009? Ask the civilian victims of drone strikes in Pakistan how that worked out.

Why weren’t we listening when the opposition leader and former political prisoner told CNN in 2013 that she had “been a politician all along”, that her ambition was to become president of her country?

The sad truth is that when it comes to “The Lady”, it is well past time to take off the rose-tinted glasses. To see Suu Kyi for what she is: A former prisoner of conscience, yes, but now a cynical politician who is willing to put votes ahead of principles; party political advancement ahead of innocent Rohingya lives.

“Ultimately our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless,” Suu Kyi grandly declaimed in June 2012, as she finally accepted her Nobel Peace Prize, in person, 21 years after she won it while under house arrest, “a world of which each and every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace”.

Forget the world. She should try starting at home, with the Rohingya of Rakhine. And if she won’t, or can’t, then maybe she should consider handing back the prize she waited more than two decades to collect.

About 400 refugees have been rescued by local fishermen in the Strait of Malacca, off Indonesia’s Aceh province, after their stricken boat was reportedly turned away numerous times from the Thai and Malaysian coasts by authorities.

The rescue occurred hours before the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia issued a statement saying they would “continue to provide humanitarian assistance to those 7,000 irregular migrants still at sea” and offer them temporary shelter, provided they were resettled and repatriated within a year.

Khairul Nova, a search and rescue official, said the rescue took place at 2am local time on Wednesday (19:00 GMT Tuesday) and those saved included woman and children. Those rescued were taken to Simpang Tiga village, in East Aceh district, he said.

Witnesses in Aceh said that many of the rescued migrants were in tears when they made it to land, with many very sick and weak.

Migrants told Al Jazeera they had been sent away by the Thai navy on three occasions and Malaysian authorities twice.

The second time they were rebuffed by Malaysian authorities, they say they were held at gunpoint and told that their ship would be bombed if they did not turn around.

About 1,500 Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar, fleeing persecution, and Bangladeshis, seeking to escape grinding poverty, have already arrived in Aceh in recent days after being abandoned by people smugglers.

They are among several thousands who have made it to land in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand after being dumped by smugglers following the disruption of long-established human-trafficking routes.

Malaysia’s foreign minister hosted his Indonesian and Thai counterparts on Wednesday for urgent talks on the refugee crisis, with pressure mounting on them to help thousands of starving refugees.

The three nations have sparked outrage by turning away vessels overloaded with migrants.

In the statement issued after the talks, the three government agreed to “continue to uphold their responsibilities and obligations under international law”.

The statement did not say that Thailand would join Malaysia and Indonesia in providing temporary shelter to the thousands of migrants still believed to be drifting on boats in the Strait of Malacca and nearby international waters.

“[We] call upon the international community to uphold their responsibility and urgently share the burden of providing the necessary support to Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand in addressing the problem,” the statement said.

The three countries requested financial support to provide shelter to the migrants and said “the international community will take responsibility for the repatriation of the irregular migrants to their countries of origin or resettlement to third countries within … one year”.

Myanmar said on Wednesday it was “ready to provide humanitarian assistance” to refugees, in its most conciliatory comments yet.

Thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants have been left stranded at sea, after a crackdown against people traffickers in Thailand prompted dozens of boat owners and crew to abandon their human cargo.

Those at sea have been left without food and water, and will certainly die if they are not rescued soon. Now that more than 2,000 people have been rescued or arrived at their shores, Indonesian, Malaysian and Thai authorities have united in refusing to rescue further boats and claiming that they will turn back any more arrivals.

Their refusal to accept Rohingya boats mirrors the early years of the Indochina refugee crisis, when Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand collectively refused to grant asylum to arrivals from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. After thousands of people had been pushed back by land and sea, that situation was eventually resolved with an agreement for permanent resettlement of refugees to western nations, primarily the US.

But that was a very different time, shaped by Cold War politics that are now a distant memory. Today, with the European Union showing little sympathy for boat arrivals on its own shores, a coordinated international response seems highly improbable.

Wrong answer

Thailand’s crackdown on migrant traffickers followed the discovery of a mass grave in a suspected trafficking camp in southern Thailand. But while trafficking is undoubtedly a very real risk, Rohingya migration is not only or even primarily an issue of trafficking, and pushing back boats is not the answer.

Many of those now stranded at sea are not voluntary migrants but refugees who face persecution if returned to Myanmar. As in the Mediterranean, ending boat migration in south-east Asia will require shifting the focus from smugglers and traffickers to address the drivers of forced migration. For the Rohingya, that means tackling statelessness and human rights violationsinside Myanmar, and discrimination throughout south east Asia.

This is obviously easier said than done. The crisis facing the Rohingya in Myanmar is an entrenched, intractable problem with few avenues for positive reform. Rohingya communities have been denied citizenship for decades and face draconian restrictions on travel, movement and marriage. This has been compounded recently by the cancellation of all Temporary Registration Certificates, the only identity document that most Rohingya possess, and a document required to vote in the upcoming elections.

Myanmar’s Rohingya fear for their survival. Those who have fled to Bangladesh have fared little better, with little or no access to education and health services and very restricted access to the UN and other international agencies. These conditions have forced migration to other countries: to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia but also to India, Nepal and even Saudi Arabia.

What can ASEAN do?

To stop the immediate humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the Andaman Sea and Malacca Strait, and to develop a lasting regional solution, member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) need to step in.

Until now, ASEAN’s policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of a member state has prevented regional discussion of Rohingya statelessness and discrimination. The current crisis clearly shows that this is not a matter of Myanmar’s internal affairs but is affecting many other countries in the region. ASEAN members have a stake in resolving this situation and must cooperate in doing so.

A meeting has been arranged in Bangkok for May 29 2015, but those at sea will certainly die if no action is taken before then. There is an urgent need to stop boat pushbacks and begin emergency rescue of those stranded.

In the longer term, the focus must be on improving the treatment of Rohingya people inside Myanmar. Full citizenship for stateless Rohingya is difficult to envisage in Myanmar’s current political climate, but there are other possibilities. ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights have outlined a number of constructive suggestions, beginning with providing a mandate to the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights to investigate the situation and officially monitor Myanmar’s response.

Practical action that should be taken by Myanmar includes improving basic living conditions of Rohingya communities in Myanmar by ensuring access to clean water, adequate nutrition and health care and appropriate shelter materials. Administrative and legal reforms should end discriminatory restrictions on Rohingya people (such as restrictions on movement and marriage) and reinstate the temporary registration cards that were recently withdrawn. Crimes of discrimination and hate speech should be prosecuted, not permitted to flourish as they have until now.

A global responsibility

ASEAN member states have a key role to play, but this is not solely an ASEAN responsibility. Many states have flocked to provide aid and assistance to Myanmar since a process of political reform began in 2011. Those states are now entitled to demand some return for their investment, in the shape of an improved protection environment for the Rohingya and for other ethnic groups inside Myanmar.

In the meantime, a massive humanitarian crisis is unfolding in south east Asia. Thousands of people remain stranded at sea, and they will certainly die if they are not rescued soon. But as in the Mediterranean, tragic suffering could still be averted if those with the power to act would only show some moral leadership and begin the required rescue.

Kirsten McConnachie is a Research Fellow in Refugee Studies at University of Oxford.

Manila: The Philippine government has said it is willing to open the country’s doors to minority Rohingya migrants who have fled Myanmar and Bangladesh, saying that it is committed to the United Nations pledge to protect asylum seekers and refugees.

“Let us not fall short of providing humanitarian relief and assistance that is asked of us, as we pride ourselves to be a compassionate and hospitable people,” Senator Paolo Aquino said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

“We call on the proper international agencies to process the legal issues immediately for the welfare of the boat people,” said Aquino, a cousin and political ally of President Benigno Aquino.

The statement came after Philippine Justice Secretary Leila de Lima said on Monday that the country has an obligation to admit and protect asylum seekers, even when the refugees do not have documents to prove their status.

“If there are boat people who come to us seeking the protection of our government, there is a process, there are existing mechanisms on how to handle these refugees or asylum seekers,” de Lima said in a statement.

The Philippine justice secretary’s remarks came after a spokesman of the president was earlier quoted as saying that the refugees could be turned away because they do not have the necessary documents.

Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia have been in high-level talks in an attempt to solve the refugee crisis after boats holding more than 2,000 migrants, including many Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshis, landed in their countries in recent weeks.

UN agencies urged the three regional powers on Tuesday to step up their sea rescue operations and let desperate migrants reach land.

In a joint statement, joined by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the agencies called on the three countries to stop trying to push boats away from their territorial waters.

Authorities should “provide for effective, predictable disembarkation to a place of safety with adequate and humane reception conditions” and establish screening procedures to identify those in need of international protection as refugees, the statement added.

The Philippines has a long history of hosting refugees from other Asian countries, and as far as Europe.

During World War II, then Philippine President Manuel Quezon ordered the admission of 1,500 Jewish refugees fleeing from the Holocaust in Europe.

Following the war and the communist victory in the civil war in China, thousands of Chinese refugees also settled in the Philippines.

In the 1970s, as Vietnam was engaged in a civil war, the Philippines also provided sanctuary to Vietnamese “boat people” building a Vietnamese village in the western island of Palawan. Most of the refugees were eventually resettled in other countries, many of them in the US.

About 900 migrants have landed on the shores of Indonesia and Thailand after being adrift at sea for weeks, authorities said.

The migrants are among the few who have successfully sneaked past a wall of resistance mounted by Southeast Asian countries who are turning them away.

Several thousand refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar – fleeing either poverty or persecution – are believed to be adrift on boats in the Andaman Sea in what has become a spiralling humanitarian crisis, reported the Associated Press news agency.

In recent days, about 2,000 landed in Malaysia and Indonesia, but both countries then said they could not accept any more.

“What do you expect us to do?” asked Malaysian Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Jafaar on Thursday. “We have been very nice to the people who broke into our border. We have treated them humanely, but they cannot be flooding our shores like this.”

“We have to send the right message that they are not welcome here.”

Fisherman towed two boats to Indonesia’s eastern Aceh province early on Friday – one with nearly 700 people and another carrying 47, police said.

A search-and-rescue official said hundreds were being housed in a warehouse.

“The latest information we have is about 794 people were found in the middle of the sea and brought ashore by fishermen at 5am,” Khairul Nova, the official in the town of Langsa in Aceh, told the Reuters news agency by telephone.

“They are now in a warehouse by the port as a temporary arrangement.”

Police sad the larger boat was on the verge of sinking when fishermen brought it to the fishing village of Lagsa.

“Some of the people told police they were abandoned at sea for days and Malaysian authorities had already turned their boat away,” said Lieutenant Colonel Sunarya, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.

He said everyone aboard was weak from hunger and dehydrated.

About 25km south of Langsa, fisherman rescued the smaller boat carrying 47 Rohingya migrants, also dehydrated and hungry, said Aceh Tamiang police chief Dicky Sandoni. They were brought to a beach at Kuala Seruway village in Aceh’s Tamiang district.

Rohingya migrants

Separately, the Thai Navy found a group of 106 people, mostly men but including 15 women and two children, on a small island off the coast of Phang Nga province, an area known for its world-class scuba diving.

“It’s not clear how they ended up on the island,” said Prayoon Rattanasenee, the Phang Nga provincial governor. The group said they were Rohingya migrants from Myanmar.

“We are in the process of identifying if they were victims of human trafficking.”

The plight of Myanmar’s 1.3 million Rohingya has worsened recently and in the last three years more than 120,000 members of the Muslim minority, who are intensely persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, have boarded ships to flee to other countries, paying huge sums to human traffickers.

But faced with a regional crackdown on human trafficking, some captains and smugglers have abandoned their ships, leaving an estimated 6,000 refugees to fend for themselves, according to aid workers and human rights groups.

Indonesian military has told Al Jazeera that they will send back any boat with Rohingya migrants entering its waters as a vessel carrying hundreds of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh was turned away towards Malaysia.

Fuad Basya, Indonesian military spokesman, said that they pulled back a boat “full of people in dire conditions, smelling bad, some were screaming”, adding that they provided the migrants with water, food, medicine and fuel.

AFP news agency reported that the boat carrying an estimated 400 migrants was intercepted on the coast of northwestern Aceh region on Monday.

Meanwhile, rights groups have urged regional governments to save thousands of migrants believed to be stranded at sea in Southeast Asia and at the risk of death.

An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar remain trapped in crowded, wooden boats, officials and activists said on Tuesday.

Nearly 2,000 people have reached Malaysia and Indonesia in the past two days after Thailand announced a crackdown on smuggling routes. They were rescued from overcrowded boats after being stranded at sea.

Myanmar shirks responsibility

Even as a large number of migrants originated from Myanmar, its government said that they will not take responsibility for migrants who are not their own citizens.

“If it is true and proven that they are from Myanmar, we will take responsibility for them. But not the Bangladeshis,” Zaw Htay, the director of Myanmar’s president’s office told Al Jazeera.

“Some of the Rohingya people may have come from Bangladesh. We can’t be responsible for them. But we do not accept the name Rohingya. They are Bengali,” Htay added referring to Myanmar’s long-persecuted Rohingya Muslim community.

The Rohingya, who are Muslim, have for decades suffered from state-sanctioned discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, which considers them illegal settlers from Bangladesh even though their families have lived there for generations.

Those comments come a day after more than a 1,000 migrants, including children from both countries, were detained in Malaysia after they arrived in the popular Malaysian resort island of Langkawi.

The police chief in Langkawi told Al Jazeera’s Karishma Vyas that 1,158 people were being held on the island. At least 672 are Bangladeshi, and around 486 of them are Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar.

At least 100 women and 60 children were among them. The migrants were in a very poor state, suffering from dehydration as well as hunger.

The police say they believe the captain as well as the other traffickers on the three boats had escaped in another vessel and left the migrants to their own devices.

Regional problem

The Arakan Project, a group advocating for the rights of Rohingya, has said as many as 8,000 people may be adrift.

Chris Lewa, the director of Arakan Project, told Al Jazeera that “there were at least three other boats near Langkawi island in Malaysia – one of them in distress” on Monday night.

She said that a big concern is where these migrants could go, and despite this being a regional problem, if there was any country willing to deal with them.

Earlier, the International Organisation for Migration called on Southeast Asian governments to find and rescue the migrants trapped at sea.

Joe Lowry, a spokesman for the organisation, told Al Jazeera that some of the migrants may have been at sea since early March.

He said that from what they’ve seen so far, many of the migrants who make it to the shore are in poor health, with some suffering from vitamin B deficiency and acute malnutrition.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has said 25,000 people are believed to have embarked from January to March, double the previous year’s pace, and that an estimated 300 had died.

Nearly 2,000 people have reached Malaysia and Indonesia in the past two days [Reuters]